A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history´s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors´ Russian Legends series, listeners can get caught up on the lives of Russia´s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known. The world has never had its shortage of legends surrounding the lives of supposed mystics, visionaries, and prophets. But few have ever grabbed a hold on pop culture quite like Grigori Rasputin, one of the most shadowy and mysterious figures in Russian history. Naturally, what makes Rasputin one of the 20th century´s most colorful and memorable figures is what we do not know. It is unclear how much basis in fact accounts of Rasputin´s life truly hold, since the sources mostly consist of memoirs, hearsay, and embellished legend. Some contemporaries considered him a saintly mystic, psychic, healer, and prophet, while others considered him a debauched heretic. The extent to which he beguiled the ruling Romanovs, and how he did so, remains mysterious as well. It´s hard to kill a legend, and that has literally been the case with Rasputin, whose death remains the most legendary aspect of his life. Perhaps the best known part of the Rasputin story is that his murderers practically had to kill him 10 times to finish him off, using everything from poison to bullets to drowning. Naturally, exactly how Rasputin actually died remains a source of controversy as well. 1. Language: English. Narrator: Jared Wekenman. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/032583/bk_acx0_032583_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

The North is simultaneously a location, a direction, and a mystical concept. Although this concept has ancient roots in mythology, folklore, and fairy tales, it continues to resonate today within modern culture. McIntosh leads listeners, chapter by chapter, through the magical and spiritual history of the North, as well as its modern manifestations, as documented through physical records, such as runestones and megaliths, but also through mythology and lore. This mythic conception of a unique, powerful, and mysterious Northern civilization was known to the Greeks as ´´Hyberborea´´ - the ´´Land Beyond the North Wind´´ - which they considered to be the true origin place of their god, Apollo, bringer of civilization. Through the Greeks, this concept of the mythic North would spread throughout Western civilization. In addition, McIntosh discusses Russian Hyperboreanism, which he describes as among ´´the most influential of the new religions and quasi-religious movements that have sprung up in Russia since the fall of Communism´´ and which is currently almost unknown in the West. 1. Language: English. Narrator: Simon Vance. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/blak/013303/bk_blak_013303_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Fedor Sologub (1863-1927) was a Russian mystic and realist and one of the great novelists and short story writers of the Dostoyevsky school. A favourite theme of his was reincarnation, which he uses very powerfully in his story A Soothing Dream, which describes the last weeks of a dying boy´s life. 1. Language: English. Narrator: Cathy Dobson. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/redd/000584/bk_redd_000584_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

From the best-selling author of The Last Templar, an action-packed adventure thriller of an ancient mystery and its deadly impact on the present. Siberia, 1916. A mine turns into a bloodbath when its miners attack each other savagely and ferociously. Minutes later two men - a horrified scientist and infamous Russian mystic Rasputin - hit a detonator, blowing up the mine to conceal all evidence of the carnage. New York, present day. FBI agent Sean Reilly is tasked with a disturbing new case. A Russian embassy attaché seems to have committed suicide by jumping out of a fourth-floor window. The apartment´s owners have gone missing while a faceless killer roams New York City, leaving a trail of death in his wake. Reilly´s investigation uncovers a deadly search for a mysterious device whose origins reach back to the darkest days of the Cold War and to Imperial Russia and which, in the wrong hands, could have a devastating impact on the modern world. 1. Language: English. Narrator: Jeff Harding. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/orio/000989/bk_orio_000989_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Fedor Sologub (1863-1927) was the greatest of the Russian symbolists. Alongside his great novel The Little Demon, he wrote a number of masterful and haunting short stories, among which ´´The White Dog´´ is a superb example of his beautiful, poetic, and mystic prose. 1. Language: English. Narrator: Cathy Dobson. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/redd/000559/bk_redd_000559_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

The first 30 years of the 20th-century produced a theatrical explosion whose reverberations are still felt today. Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Vakhtanghov, Michael Chekhov in Russia; Reinhardt, Piscator and Brecht in Germany; and Copeau, Barrault and Artaud in France collectively demolished the 19th-century aesthetic and, in their wake, created the modernity which is the hallmark of today´s theatre. Most of these men have already been turned into modern icons; there is no shortage of bios on the pioneers of the Moscow Arts Theatre, and the achievements of the others are chronicled and archived for posterity. Only one of these artists remains murky and ill-defined. He is Michael Chekhov (1891-1955), nephew of the famous playwright Anton Chekhov, the man that Stanislavsky described as ´´the most brilliant actor in all of Russia.´´ A charismatic actor, an inspiring director and a teacher that developed a dynamic antidote to Russian Naturalism, Chekhov remains the invisible man of the modern theatre. Was he, as Lee Strasberg alleged, a dangerous mystic who would subvert the vigor of Stanislavsky´s teachings and undermine the integrity of The Group Theatre? Or was he, as his disciples - Yul Brynner, Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Quinn, Jack Palance, Leslie Caron, Jennifer Jones, Patricia Neal, Anthony Hopkins, Jack Nicholson and Marilyn Monroe - believed, a man who had discovered a unique approach to acting which transcended the precepts enshrined in Stanislavsky´s ´´System.´´ Charles Marowitz was granted special access to the Chekhov archives in Devon, England, and he interviewed actors and directors who worked closely with Chekhov both in Europe and America. The book chronicles Chekhov´sinfluential period in Hollywood when he was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the avuncular psychiatrist in Alfred Hitchcock´s 1945 film Spellbound. It also describes his close association with Marilyn Monroe at the most delicate stage of her career.

Like the film Julie and Julia, this book is a true story based on the lives of two women who lived at different times and places but who had uniquely intertwined lives. Elizabeth Spring, astrologer and aspiring writer, finds Annie Besant because of unusual similarities in their astrology charts. Annie is a woman who´s been lost in history - a woman who was a passionate social reformer and who was declared ´´an unfit mother´´ and lost custody of her children because of distributing information on birth control in 1875. After trials and depression, Annie becomes a passionate spiritual seeker; being mentored by the Russian psychic Madame Blavatsky, head of the Theosophical Society. As Elizabeth struggles to write a screenplay of Annie´s life she discovers the heartfelt and obsessive story of Annie´s adopted son, the young mystic J. Krishnamurti, and the occultist, Charles Leadbeater. Elizabeth questions the role of fate and reincarnation in her own life by what she uncovers about her mysterious relationship with Annie who was born exactly 100 years earlier, in Victorian England in 1847. 1. Language: English. Narrator: Laura Jennings. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/033867/bk_acx0_033867_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.